


The Last True Mouthpiece

by SeaOfBones



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dalish Issues, Dorian Pavus Has Issues, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, POV Dorian Pavus, Well of Sorrows (Dragon Age), accidentally having serious conversations at 4am while nude, male lavellan and solas hate each other's guts, rated t for fade To black
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27215191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeaOfBones/pseuds/SeaOfBones
Summary: Lavellan does not drink from the Well of Sorrows. Dorian wonders if it was his begging that convinced him - and if it was the right choice.
Relationships: Male Inquisitor/Dorian Pavus, Male Lavellan/Dorian Pavus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	The Last True Mouthpiece

Dorian was already awake when someone knocked at the door of Lavellan's quarters. Lavellan lifted his startled head from Dorian's bare chest at the noise, blonde hair ruffled every which way and green eyes dull in the near-darkness of early morning.

As far as Dorian had been able to observe, the Inquisitor had always been a light sleeper. Dorian supposed it must be habit for the Dalish, particularly someone so habitually _responsible_ as Lavellan - rising at the sound of a crack in the branches, always alert for danger coming from any direction. Absolutely none of the luxury of a deep and stupefying Minrathous hangover.

He just didn't normally look so... tired, when he woke. But then, their last excursion from Skyhold had been, well... rather a lot to take in.

"Go back to sleep," Dorian said lightly.

“It’s fine, I should get up,” Lavellan replied. Dorian scoffed as he slipped from the bed, and folded his half of the softly embroidered blanket over Lavellan, as if such a meagre weight could keep the Inquisitor down had he been truly intent on rising. But Lavellan relented, and lay back down. That the Inquisitor slept, sometimes, was what Dorian would argue to be his single point of purely positive influence over him.

Dorian smirked over his shoulder at Lavellan's languid shape beneath the sheets as he snatched his threadbare dressing gown from the bedpost and tied the belt around his waist, suggestively loose. "I'm not done with you yet."

"You’re going to give my visitor a fright in that," Lavellan replied wanly, stifling a yawn against the back of his marked hand in a manner so casual that one could almost forget precisely what had caused the ragged scar across his palm. “What if it’s poor Mother Giselle?”

“Oh, that woman is hardly _poor_ ,” Dorian protested. He, frankly, hoped it _was_ Mother Giselle. He still hasn’t quite forgiven her for the incident with his father, nor for what she’d said to him after. “I expect she will stare at me sternly as she prays for your immortal soul,” he added, not without bitterness. “Her opinion of me has nowhere further to drop.”

“Well, if you’re going to be tormenting the guests most mornings anyway, perhaps you should move in to my quarters,” Lavellan teased. “Or at least, stop pretending you haven’t done so already.”

“We both know that as soon as I even considered such a thing, Leliana would have my bags at your door within the hour,” Dorian said. “Perhaps I like the space.”

“Between here and the corner of the library that nobody else dares touch I think you’ve got enough space already,” Lavellan replied lazily.

Dorian laughed as he walked down the short flight of stairs, pulling the door open and leaning against it with one mockingly practiced movement that would give whoever it was very little time to react to Dorian’s sudden appearance. It was not, in fact, Mother Giselle, or another of her dear Chantry lambs.

It was Cullen, standing stiff-straight and holding a bundle of paper.

"We need to stop meeting like this, General Rutherford," Dorian drawled.

Cullen tried, unsuccessfully, to disguise the flustered interruption to his stern demeanour with a clearing of his throat and a sudden interest in a chip in the door just above Dorian's fingers.

"Dorian," Cullen stammered. "My apologies, I didn't realise you were-- I didn't realise the Inquisitor had a guest this morning.

Josephine and Leliana had already taken Dorian's hints that, should they not wish to be greeted by a sour-tempered and barely-groomed Dorian in a robe that scarcely covered his unmentionables, they were best to leave the Inquisitor's quarters undisturbed until a more reasonable hour, but Cullen and Cassandra were somewhat slower to pick up on his lesson, despite appearing to be the most embarrassed by the situation.

“I’ll return later,” Cullen added quickly, turning to leave.

"It's quite alright, Cullen," Dorian replied dryly. "Although I will say that when Josephine turns up at the arse-crack of dawn, she at least brings the good coffee and some of yesterday's bread." He flashed a barbed smile, and held his hand out for the papers. "If this matter is so important that it requires the Inquisitor to attend to it before he's had time to dress. I shall deliver your request to him immediately."

"Right," Cullen said rigidly, cautiously passing over the papers. "Thanks. I'll-- I'll be going now, then."

"Right," Dorian echoed. "Goodbye, then, General."

He closed the door as Cullen left and sighed theatrically, loud enough for Lavellan to hear.

"You know," Lavellan replied, voice floating across the bedroom. "You don't need to be so hard on him."

Dorian was well aware of that. Lavellan was exhausted this morning, but he was exhausted most mornings. Dorian walked back up the stairs, all lightness gone from his footsteps as he glanced across the front page of Cullen's briefing. _The movement of forces through eluvians_. All knowledge gleaned through Morrigan’s visions from the Well of Sorrows.

The well of the ancient elves, the people whose history had been lost to the Dalish. The one that Dorian had begged Lavellan not to drink from himself. He could give himself rationalisations. The Inquisitor and his anchor were necessary, and it would be impractical to risk losing him to unnecessary danger. The elvhen language had changed so much to become modern Dalish that both Morrigan and the Inquisitor had an equal grasp of it. Any knowledge Morrigan gained could be written down, the ruins still studied by the Dalish, the magic and methods of the eluvians passed on to their Keepers.

But it hadn’t been the Inquisitor, or his people, that Dorian had been thinking of. It had been Lavellan alone. It had been that desperate, panicked fear that had led them to have a rare argument after the _incident_ in the Fade, the horror of those few seconds when Dorian had thought he had lost the man he had come to love with that fierce _need_ he had smothered in Tevinter, fearing what his heart was capable of.

“Dorian?” Lavellan said, deceptively softly. He was sitting up, coiled and alert, all languorous indulgence dissipated into the sheets.

Dorian forced a smile. It was not a case of whether Lavellan would notice the falsity of his expression – he most certainly would – but whether he would allow himself to follow Dorian’s diversion. He tightened the belt on his robe, the room feeling colder now, fully suffused with the chill mountain air of Skyhold.

“More paperwork from Cullen,” Dorian breezed, gesturing with the papers in such a manner that Lavellan wouldn’t be able to see what was written on the cover. “I’m really not sure what that man was thinking. If you _must_ read it now,” Dorian said, trying to warm himself again by Lavellan’s body as he perched on the edge of the bed. “You can read it in bed, although I suspect it can wait a while.”

Lavellan looked Dorian in the eye, serene and adoring, as he snatched the briefing from his hands. It seemed he would not be diverted, after all.

“The vir'abelasan,” Lavellan murmured. And then he stared silently at Dorian, and waited for him to explain himself.

Dorian pulled the covers back over himself, as if sharing a bed could stop this from coming between them. And he spoke, looking not at Lavellan but out at the dark mountains.

“The Well… it was the knowledge of your people. And I begged you not to drink of it, and you didn’t. Did I… have I taken something from your people?” Dorian gestured helplessly. “It would hardly be the first time a man of Tevinter has robbed the Dalish of something irreplaceable.”

“…Dorian,” Lavellan replied. When he turned his head only slightly, Lavellan reached for him, gently calloused fingers tilting Dorian to face him, his green eyes gently serious. “If I really wanted to drink from the Well of Sorrows, do you _really_ think you could have stopped me?”

Dorian’s mouth trembled. “Probably not,” he admitted.

Lavellan lowered his hand. “I… won’t say that your words had no effect on me,” he admitted. “The threat of death is so common to me now that it hardly bares acknowledging, but you were… really, truly afraid for me. If I had drunk from the well, and come back as something else or not at all… I didn’t want to lose you. I didn’t. And that is not Tevinter, Dorian. That’s _you_. But I had truly wanted to, well…” He attempted an impersonation of Dorian’s smirk, without mirth. “You already know that I have a _terrible proclivity for reckless heroics even in the face of obviously overwhelming danger_.”

Dorian returned a soft half-smile as Lavellan drew his shrouded knees to his chest. There was only one question Dorian was likely to ask now, and they both knew it.

“Then, why didn’t you want to?”

“I’ve been trying to work that out myself,” Lavellan murmured. “Many Dalish have died to retrieve lesser artifacts, and been celebrated for returning our broken history to us. If the world was as it was before the Conclave, I would have drunk without question, even if that meant death. I can tell you the _rational_ reasons for why that might have changed. We most likely still need the anchor to face Corypheus, and I knew that if it came between knowledge of our people and the world, my people would forgive me, especially with Morrigan taking the risk for knowledge in my place. But… I don’t feel that’s the answer.”

He curled tighter, resting his crossed arms against his knees. Dorian did not move closer. He knew Lavellan enough to know when he needed to be held, and when he needed to be left to think.

“I have the anchor, now, and I have you. But, more than that… I think I understand, now, how the city elves feel when they look at us. My clan are friendlier than most, but I know our kind. Those of us who see them as untrue to the history of their people due to the circumstances of their lives. They could uproot their alienages and set out as a new clan just as easily as we could settle as one people and build a new gleaming city. Solas and Abelas have made it clear that they don’t see us as of the same kind as the elves of Arlathan. But we are more than one city, more than one clan. Whatever we have lost, the lives of the Dalish, of all the elves that survive, and the new ways we have handed down for ages, are what we have now. I would not give my life or my mind to drink of ghosts that would have me burn all that we have become and replace it with what they once knew. That would be another history lost, and we have already lost enough of it. I may be apart from my people, but I know that we are enough.”

Dorian waited a moment after Lavellan had finished speaking, to ensure that he was done. And then he said, dryly and calmly: “So you’re telling me that you chose not to drink from the well _not_ because you’ve finally learned your lesson about martyring yourself, or because you adore me so much that you would never wound me by leaving, but because Solas’ endless prattling about how far the elves have fallen annoyed you.”

Lavellan’s expression attempted to stay grim, but his eyes betrayed his unintended amusement. “That’s…” He gave an exasperated laugh.

“A mockery of the outpouring of your heart, I know,” Dorian replied. He knew he would never, truly, understand the difficulties of being one of the Dalish. To compare their situation to Tevinter’s relationship to its history seemed a mockery, even if it was the closest lens in Dorian’ experiences with which to view it.

“You’re terrible,” Lavellan replied, throwing a look at Dorian.

Dorian felt his own demeanour sobering, meeting Lavellan’s eyes again. Before they fell to distraction he spoke once more, with a strange calmness. “Do you think you made the right choice?”

Lavellan shook his head gently. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe what I said is just another way to give myself a reason. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I didn’t have time to think it through. But… it’s done now. I am alive and unchanged. Whatever might have been different in a world where I am in Morrigan’s place… I don’t regret this, Dorian. I don’t regret my people being as they are, and I don’t regret still being here with you. We remember those who have died for knowledge not just in celebration of what we now know, but in mourning that we have lost the chance to know them, as they would have been had they survived. To wake up here, among friends, with you by my side… if Morrigan and I woke up at the Well tomorrow, I would make this choice again.”

Lavellan lifted his head, ever so slightly. “After what Halward tried to do to you, you said you could never forgive him. Because you would never know if he would have regretted what he did if he succeeding in transforming you. It’s… not the same. But… if the ghosts of Arlathan would not respect my people as they are, then they do not deserve to change us.”

Dorian nodded silently. Talking about Halward was… hardly his favourite subject. Lavellan uncurled from his pensive position, and lowered his knees a fraction. Dorian drew him closer, gently at first and then held him perhaps much firmer than he had intended. Quiet, for a moment.

“I can’t pretend to know what’s best for your people,” Dorian said, murmuring against Lavellan’s forehead. “Even my arrogance has its limits.”

Lavellan laughed softly, pretending he didn’t believe him.

“Oh, shush,” Dorian teased. “I’m trying to be sincere.”

“As you will,” Lavellan replied. He lifted his neck, and pressed his forehead against Dorian’s.

“I was about to say something deeply beautiful, but now you’ve made me forget it,” Dorian lied. “I suppose this will have to do.”

He kissed Lavellan with a mocking softness, barely a kiss at all, frankly, and then pulled back, running a gentle thumb over Lavellan’s vallaslin. He thought of the first time he had touched them, Lavellan pressing Dorian’s hands against his marked face in desperate sincerity, the one intimacy between them that Dorian had not dared to suggest with even the mildest innuendo. He should have known that Lavellan loved him then. Perhaps he had, and just hadn’t been willing to admit it until later.

“I can’t pretend to know what’s best for your people,” Dorian repeated. “But I have quite a lot of opinions about _you_ , and not quite so many qualms about sharing them.” He kissed him again, and smiled bluntly. “I love how little you listen to me, Amatus. I cannot say I will always agree with your choices. Some of them are, honestly, dreadful. But _you_ …”

Dorian sighed.

“The world has already been cruel to your clan, in removing you to such a distance as our Inquisitor. I asked about your choices because I was afraid I had… taken you from them. That they were deprived of one of their own drinking from the Well because I’m… holding you back.”

Dorian was aware that it sounded faintly ridiculous aloud. Of course he couldn’t bend a will so stubborn as Lavellan’s. His desires were not so tantalisingly corrupting as that.

“You are not in Tevinter anymore, Dorian,” Lavellan said quietly, running his careful fingers through Dorian’s closely-shorn hair. “You are not luring me away from my family, or my duty, by tricking me into bed, any more than I have turned the heir of House Pavus away from Tevinter once and for all. Our choices are our own, Dorian.”

Dorian swallowed. How many times had he found his mind falling into the same old patterns? Enough for Lavellan to notice, certainly.

And yet, at least he found this conversation easier, less shameful, each time it came around. Lavellan was no longer aghast at how Tevinter had convinced him to think – he simply noticed, and he spoke.

“But I’m still glad you asked about the Well of Sorrows, if I’m honest,” Lavellan continued. “I was uneasy about it, and it’s not the easiest subject to discuss, especially when everything is moving so fast.” He paused, and traced his fingers across Dorian’s cheek. “But I love all of you, Ma Vhenan. Your fears, too.”

Dorian moved towards Lavellan. There was a fluttering thump, as Cullen’s bundle of papers slid off the bed and distributed themselves across the floor.

They could wait.

“I’ll have you know I was a very well-behaved and respected member of Tevinter society before I met you,” Dorian said dryly. They laughed against each other as Dorian pulled the covers over them, blocking out the cold room, and the sun that struggled to rise. He felt only Lavellan, his warm skin and the familiar sheets that smelled of both of them.

He really had already moved in, hadn’t he?

“I adore you, Amatus,” Dorian murmured. The light mirth did not return to him. He pressed himself closer, needing to hold, to feel, to know Lavellan in his entirety, and be known in turn. There was something serious to his kiss, yearning and desperate, warm and dark. “I adore you, I adore you. As you were, as you are, as you will be.”

Lavellan’s hands burned in the dark. A dozen pages stayed where they had fallen on an old red rug, slowly brightening to brilliant white beneath the mountain sun.


End file.
